Dead Certain

took us most of the morning to draft our complaint against Health Care Corporation. Legally we both knew that it was something of a stretch. Our claim was based on a dubious precedent that Sherman had unearthed involving the sale of a nursing home owned by the Catholic Church to a for-profit chain. While the decision itself supported our argument, the facts of the two situations were hardly identical. However, at this point we didn’t have time to come up with something better.
    Neither Sherman nor I thought our claim would stand up under judicial scrutiny, but with a little luck it might be enough to buy us a thirty-day injunction delaying the sale, which would give us time to come up with something better. Besides, all my instincts told me that time was on our side. I still had no idea why HCC wanted to move so fast, but whatever their reasons, there was a good chance that any delay would work to our advantage. Sherman, who had a weakness for football analogies, referred to this as our Hail Mary strategy.
     
    Mark Millman called just as I was about to take the first bite of my lunch. “Polish interruptus,” quipped Cheryl, who’d stopped at Gold Coast Dogs on her way from Loyola. The business half of Delirium was calling from his cell phone in the lobby of the building to say that he was on his way up. He did not sound pleased.
    I sighed and wrapped my lunch back up and handed it to Cheryl, who departed along with Sherman, leaving the scent of melted cheddar and jalapenos in their wake. I didn’t know what to expect from Millman, so I braced myself for the worst. It wasn’t a wasted effort.
    Mark Millman looked like a man who’d spent the night on a ledge threatening to jump. His shirt was grimy around the collar and saddlebagged with sweat. There was an unhealthy flush to his complexion, and unless he’d been substituting Absolut for Aqua Velva, it seemed a fair guess to say that he’d been hitting the bottle pretty hard.
    “Hello, Mark,” I said, waving him into a chair. “You’re an awfully hard man to get ahold of.”
    “I’ve been busy.”
    “At COMDEX?”
    “Uh-huh. I’ve been hanging out at the Icon hospitality suite. They have the best booze. Not only that, but I figure it’s all I’m going to get out of that asshole Hurt so I might as well get as much of it as I can.”
    I punched the button on the intercom and asked Cheryl to bring us in some fresh coffee, not that I thought it would actually help. Years of watching my father had taught me all the signs. Millman had been drinking for so long that he didn’t seem overtly drunk, but whatever you wanted to call his current state, it was a far cry from sober.
    “Why don’t you let me get somebody to drive you home,” I suggested.
    “Home? I can’t go home. That bitch threw me out.“
    “Your wife threw you out?” I asked, feeling a little foggy on the details of Millman’s personal life.
    “She put all my stuff in trash bags and left them out on the driveway. She told me she never wanted to see me again.”
    “Why would she do that?”
    “She’s my second wife,” he confided, dropping his voice conspiratorially. “First wives marry you for better or for worse, but with second wives it’s for better or better. The minute she heard about what had happened to Bill, she started stuffing my shirts into Hefty bags.“
    “Why? What does Bill have to do with her throwing you out?”
    “After the house it was the last straw.”
    “The house?”
    “I put the house up as collateral for that bridge loan, you remember. That pissed her off pretty good. But when she heard Hurt didn’t show and that Bill had a heart attack, that did it.”
    “You mean you used your house as collateral to borrow the money that you put into Delirium?” I said, wanting to make sure I was getting it right.
    “Yeah. The two hundred grand we needed for the bridge loan. I was tapped out on all my other sources, and with Icon in the game it seemed like a safe bet. Now...” He pulled an imaginary lever and made a flushing sound.
    Cheryl arrived with the coffee. I waited until after she’d poured us each a cup before asking her to call Jeff Tannenbaum and tell him to get himself down to the office. They don’t teach you anything about drying out drunks and preventing nervous breakdowns in law school, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t.
     
    Somehow Cheryl managed to get me out of the office in time for my appointment at the hairdresser. The